Why This Hacker Stood Up Against ‘Verbal Abuse’ in Linux Land

When Sarah Sharp was a 20-year-old university student in Portland, she took on an extra-credit project writing USB driver code for the Linux kernel. She was too young to stay past 10 p.m. in some of the brew pubs where the local Linux-heads met, but she hung in as long as she could, learned a lot about Linux, and embraced the community.

Growing up in the small town of Ranier, Oregon (Pop. 1,900), she knew she wanted to be a programmer. She profiled that way: She loved playing with Legos and, later, taking apart PCs. Now, she spends her spare time in appropriately geeky pursuits: tinkering with open source rockets and writing her own gardening software (available on GitHub, natch). And over the past seven years, she’s had her dream come true. She’s been writing USB code for the Linux kernel, working with her longtime mentor, Greg Kroah-Hartman.

But this week, after Linux creator Linus Torvalds told Kroah-Hartman to get tough with developers who submitted sub-standard patches, Sharp, 28, felt he’d crossed a line, and she told him so. Torvalds says he needs to be plainspoken so that the thousands of contributors to the Linux project will get a clear message of what works and what doesn’t. But Sharp says that that aggressive tone is bad for Linux. According to her, it’s keeping some good developers away. Following is an edited transcript of a telephone interview with Sharp

WIRED: So what happened on the Linux kernel mailing list this week?

Sarah Sharp: Greg’s one of the nicest kernel maintainers out there. He’s very very polite and helpful to newcomers in the kernel. And I think he gets things done without resorting to verbal abuse.

So, basically, these people were joking: “Hey, you need to be verbally abusive.” And it just didn’t seem right. This has been something that people have tried to discuss before about the kernel communications style. So, basically, I just decided to say: “Hey, this is really not cool. We shouldn’t be advocating for having more verbal abuse on the mailing list.”

The thing is: this discussion itself is probably not going to change anyone, but it’s going to spawn a lot of private conversations. And we’re going to go talk about this when the kernel summit happens in October.

WIRED: What have people been saying to you privately, since you brought this up?

Sharp: I’ve gotten a lot of private emails expressing support for standing up to Linus. Some of these are from prominent open source people in KDE, Gnome, Canonical…I can’t say who they are because they wanted to remain private, but they basically said: “Yes, this is a problem and thank you for standing up.”

I also got some really awful hate mail that tried to drag my gender in. But I don’t think this is a gendered topic. This is about people and developers being civil and respectful to each other and trying to figure out how to communicate.

WIRED: Is this an open source issue or is this a Linux issue?

Sharp: There are some open source projects that have explicitly told their members: “We need to be civil because we don’t want to be like the kernel project.” And there are some people that justify how their project is run by saying: “Well the Linux kernel works this way.” So, I think it’s not just a Linux kernel discussion. It’s also an open source discussion.

WIRED: On your blog, you point out that much of the Linux kernel development is being done by professionals on salary. Many people don’t realize that.

Sharp: Twenty percent of the kernel contributors are either students or hobbyists. But 80 percent of the kernel contributors are paid by companies. So that means that the Linux kernel really has a lot of people from corporations on there. Some of them, like Linus, are paid by nonprofits. But it’s still becoming more of a corporate environment, and a lot of corporations have codes of conduct. And those codes of conduct often say things about how you conduct yourself on public forums or social media. The code of conduct for those companies also applies to the [Linux Kernel] mailing list.

So we need to figure out how to be respectful and civil to each other in the mailing list because this is no longer a volunteer project. People are paid to work on this. This is about making a workplace more civil and more respectful.

WIRED: You’re from a different generation than Linus. Do you think your attitude represents a changing attitude toward open source work?

Sharp: I think that my perspective is somewhat colored by both my gender and my age. A lot of the kernel maintainers came into Linux at the very beginning when there weren’t a lot of women in there. There weren’t a lot of racial minorities. There were a lot of real young kernel developers. So I think they picked up a little bit of the brogrammer culture and kind of said: “Yeah it’s OK to yell at each other because we’ll obviously just meet over beer and pound each other on the back and it will be all fine.”

Sometimes, that just doesn’t work for people who aren’t men. As for the age, I think because I came into Linux later — I came in seven years ago instead of 20 years ago — I work in a pretty diverse group at Intel. I see face-to-face a lot of different people that are working on Linux. I think I have a different perspective on how we should work together respectfully than some of the people who may have been around in Linux for longer.

WIRED: How diverse is the Linux kernel community now?

Sharp: I think less than one percent of the kernel developers are women. We don’t really know what the hard numbers are, but FOSS [Free and Open Source Software] in general is maybe 1 to 3 percent women. And proprietary software is maybe 20 to 30 percent. As for minorities, I think we’re getting a few more minorities in the kernel. But you can count them on your hand.

WIRED: Linus says that “if I’m not the way I am, then people will misunderstand me.” What do you say to that?

Sharp: You can be direct without being aggressive. You can give negative feedback without cussing people out.

There’s a fine line between showing your displeasure and verbally tearing somebody apart. How do you tell someone that their code is crap without making it into a personal attack? This discussion is going to be ongoing. I don’t expect Linus to change overnight. He’s been this way for 20 years. The only thing is: I just want to open a discussion channel and have a frank discussion with this, and have it among kernel developers.

WIRED: So how are things with you and Linus right now? Do you guys hate each other?

Sharp: I don’t hate Linus. He is who he is. He’s been doing this for a very long time. I really respect him technically. I respect his ability as a release manager — he manages so much code. So I really respect Linus, I just don’t respect his communication style. This has opened up a lot of good conversations. I don’t think we’re going to hate each other. I think we’re going to go to Kernel Summit and eat cookies and discuss this.